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Dessert

Bread Pudding with Almonds

A sweet bread pudding flavored with lemon and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bread Pudding with Almonds

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the bread crumbs over low heat.

  2. Add the lemon juice and let the mixture cool.

Combine and cook

  1. Combine the cooled mixture with sugar, grated almonds, lemon peel, and egg yolks in a large bowl.

  2. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites gently.

  3. Boil the pudding for 2 to 2½ hours or bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1¼ hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot or cold fruit sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rye + almondtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Rye + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Provide the starchy body that soaks up the butter, eggs and juice to form a pudding.
Eggs
Set the pudding and, once whites are beaten in, add lightness to the texture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the crumbs and carrying flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist and tender.
Grated almonds
Add nutty flavour and a dense, moist crumb.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites gently. Beaten egg whites trap air that gives the pudding lift. Stirring vigorously knocks that air out, leaving a heavier, denser pudding.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rye, butter, egg, sugar, almond):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rye, butter, egg, sugar, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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